News

Big news: This Fall, I moved back to Berlin, and also started teaching as an Associate Professor at The Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo! The Academy has a long standing central position in guitar education in Norway. The Guitar Department working group is the largest in the country. I am particularly thrilled to be a part of such a great team of internationally acclaimed performers and pedagogues. If you are a young guitarist looking to study music, or a grad student looking to further your carreer in Europe, don´t hesitate to contact me with any questions you may have! Our auditions are held in the Spring of 2019, and the deadline to apply or do a video audition is December 15.

Last year, Nerea Berraondo and I got to record an album with NAXOS. On two days in April, we got to work in Newcastle/Toronto with the famed Norbert Kraft, who helped us breath life into some of Fernando Sor´s lesser known and previously un-recorded works. Among them Sor´s own arrangements of Mozart arias and exhuberant French Songs, as well as some very demanding unknown works for both our instruments: voice and guitar. Needless to say, we are very excited to have this album finally out and ready for you to enjoy: as a live stream on the NAXOS site, on itunes for download, or get a copy of the CD at one of our upcoming concerts, as well as for sale online. Time to celebrate!

Fernando Sor was one of the greatest guitarists of his era and his works are still extremely popular today. His songs, however, are much less well-known. They demonstrate the superb flair of Sor’s vocal writing, in three languages, as well as the variety of his virtuosic guitar accompaniments. The three groups of songs presented here (in addition to Sor’s setting of two patriotic texts) offer distinct styles of composition, ranging from arrangements of arias from Mozart’s Don Giovanni to the dance elements of Spanish seguidillas.The official release with NAXOS is on August 11, 2017. However, you can PRE-ORDER the album on itunes, or get a copy of the CD at the webstore.

Sephardic music has its roots in the musical traditions of the Jewish communities in medieval Spain and medieval Portugal. After their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1496 the lyrics of these songs were preserved by communities formed by the Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. These Sephardic communities share many of the same lyrics and poems, but the melodies vary considerably.

Because so many centuries have passed since the expulsion, a lot of the original melodies have been lost. Instead, Sephardic music has adopted the melodies and rhythms of the various countries where the Sephardim settled in. These song traditions spread from Spain to Morocco (the Western Tradition) and several parts of the Ottoman Empire (the Eastern Tradition) including Greece, Jerusalem, the Balkans and Egypt. The song traditions were studied and transcribed in the early twentieth century by a number of ethnomusicologists and scholars of medieval Hispanic literature.